How cloud computing can support the EU’s Digital Decade
Executive Summary
The 2020s are the European Commission's Digital Decade, with ambitious targets in four areas to accelerate progress in skills, government, infrastructures and business (see Box 1).1
Public First, an independent consultancy, was commissioned by Amazon Web Services (AWS) to explore the role cloud computing can play in unlocking the EU’s digital ambitions, and to gain insight from consumers and businesses on the current state of these goals. In France, Public First constructed new economic modelling and conducted polling of over 1,002 consumers and 1,314 businesses (see Box 2).
In total, we estimate that achieving the Digital Decade goals could unlock €490 billion in economic value. This is equivalent to 22% of France's current economy.
What is the Digital Decade?
The Digital Decade is a vision for Europe's digital transformation by 2030. In 2021 the European Commission (EC) put forward a Digital Compass with key metrics to achieve the EU’s goals. These are laid out below and form the basis for the report’s analysis and recommendations.
The Potential of the Digital Decade
Across the EU, we saw that citizens recognised the importance of digital technology and the Digital Decade. Digital technology was seen as second only to Health in its importance for the economy according to respondents.
While France is making progress towards the EU’s Digital Decade goal, this needs to be accelerated to ensure we fully realise the potential in areas such as digital skills and the adoption of key technologies such as cloud (Graph 1). At the current rate of progress, France is on track to unlock just €152 billion in economic value by 2030. If France can accelerate progress towards meeting the Digital Decade goals, €335 billion in additional economic value could be unlocked by 2030.2
In this report, we look at the progress that France has made to date in pursuit of these EU targets, and how further acceleration can be achieved through partnership between governments, businesses, and citizens.
Accelerating progress will require a sustained, collective focus—across the public and private sectors—on digital adoption, skills development, infrastructures, entrepreneurship, and digital transformation of government and businesses.
Recent progress against selected Digital Decade goals
Business
State of Play: Many French businesses have yet to take full advantage of core technologies such as AI, big data or the cloud.
Key Insights
- Not enough companies are taking advantage of the power of existing digital tools. According to the European Commission, only 22 % of French companies have taken up key technologies such as the cloud, 20% AI, and 22% big data. Deploying digital tools like Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or online accounting can boost business productivity by 10-25%.
- Increasing cloud adoption will play an important role in laying the groundwork for the next generation of innovations. We estimate that a majority (55%) of the potential impact from the Digital Decade agenda is reliant on cloud computing, which is a key enabler of technologies such as AI or Big Data. If we could boost cloud adoption in small businesses across France by 10 percentage points, we estimate that that alone would increase the French economy by 0.4% of GVA, or an additional €8 billion.
Skills
State of Play: Progress over the last five years in improving basic digital skills or the number of female ICT specialists has been slow. Based on current trends the targets are unlikely to be met. For example, only 59% of France’s population is projected to have basic digital skills by 2030, versus a target of 80%.
Key Insights
- A shortage of digital skills is impeding growth for the most digitally advanced companies. 77% of businesses view digital skills as important or essential - rising to 88% for digitally intensive businesses.3 36% of digitally intense businesses said that the shortage of digital skills has slowed their growth, 31% that it has increased costs, and 31% that it has slowed the development of new technology.
- While boosting the number of ICT specialists is important, improving the digital skills of the average worker could be just as impactful. Not everybody needs to be able to write code for their job, or create their own machine learning (ML) model from scratch - but almost everyone could benefit from possessing good intermediate digital skills. On one estimate, over 40% of workers who use office software daily still do not have sufficient skills to use it effectively.4
- It will be hard to meet the EU’s target for 20 million ICT specialists by 2030 without improving inclusion. Based on current trends less than 28% of ICT specialists in France will be female in 2030, rising from 20% in 2021.
Infrastructures
State of Play: France looks likely to meet its Digital Decade targets for internet connectivity, with 53% households already covered by fixed Very High Capacity Networks (VHCN). More work is needed to support the development of low-latency solutions, such as edge computing, which enables data processing, analysis and storage closer to the source of the data.
Key Insights
- Digital infrastructure is seen as more important than traditional forms of investment such as transport. In our polling, both consumers and businesses chose faster or more reliable internet as their leading priority for connectivity infrastructure investment, ahead of other types of investment such as roads, railways or airports.
- More digital tools are needed to support Europe’s green transition. 84% of French businesses agreed that the current importance of sustainability would either be maintained or grow as a factor in their business’ decisions. However, businesses were much less confident they currently had adequate digital tools to monitor and improve sustainability, with just 57% agreeing with this statement.
- Technology choice and having access to the best technology matters more than the nationality of the company providing it. Technologies like ‘the cloud’ are not just an undifferentiated commodity, but a way of delivering many types of digital services. In our business polling, just 7% of businesses identified the nationality of the provider as one of the most important factors in choosing a cloud provider, making it the least important of 14 potential factors.
Government
State of Play: France has achieved 73% of its target for digital public services for citizens and 91% of its target of digital public services for businesses.
Key Insights
- French citizens are increasingly adopting digital government services. 82% of French citizens currently use e-government services, and 72% of French consumers said they were confident they could find information or a service through their government’s websites or apps.
- Many French citizens would feel comfortable using more digital government services - over half would be comfortable accessing their medical records online. Our polling found that just under a quarter have accessed their medical records (23%) or been asked to prove their identity (17%) online, while 49% said they would be comfortable accessing their medical records, and 39% comfortable proving their identity online, suggesting potential for further uptake.
- The cloud can play a major role in creating more agile and efficient digital public services. According to our estimates, by moving 10% of the public services' IT system to the cloud, this could free up 100 million euros through IT infrastructure and maintenance expenditure towards the development of new digital public services.
Methodology
In this study, we used a range of different methods to quantify the economic potential of the EU’s Digital Decade agenda, and the role of the cloud:
- We ran new nationally representative consumer polls in nine countries, reaching 6,830 Europeans in total, including 1,004 in France, and sought their opinion on a range of issues related to digital technology and skills.
- We ran new economically representative business polls in nine countries, representing 7,184 European senior decision makers, including 1,314 in France.
- We interviewed 10 policy stakeholders from across Europe, asking their opinion on the progress of the Digital Decade agenda.
- We conducted new literature reviews on the impact of digital technology, skills, cloud computing and AI on economic growth.
- Based on the data from our polling and the results from our literature reviews, we produced new modelling to separately estimate the impact of increasing the level of basic digital skills, business digital tool adoption, cloud computing and the use of AI and big data.
To learn more about our modelling approach, please see the Methodology section in the report’s appendix.
Public First is a member of the Market Research Society. The full tables for the data used in this report is available to download from our website. [LINK TO BE INSERTED] While AWS commissioned this report from Public First, all economic estimates are our own.
Introduction
Digital technology is one of the most important drivers of economic growth, higher living standards and increased sustainability. Since the 1980s, digital technology has been responsible for around a quarter of growth in advanced economies.5 Successive technologies such as the personal computer, spreadsheet, internet, smartphone and cloud computing have helped transform the way we live, work and communicate. In our polling, technology was seen as the sector that had done the best job of innovating in the last decade, chosen by 50% of respondents.
In 2021, the European Commission set out a ‘Digital Compass’ with targets in four areas to help support the digital transformation of the EU: business, skills, infrastructures and government.
In this report independent consultancy Public First was commissioned by Amazon Web Services (AWS) to explore how France could best make progress on its Digital Decade goals.
In order to do this we:
- Ran new polling of over 1,004 consumers and over 1,314 businesses in France to better understand their current uses and attitudes towards digital technology
- Constructed new economic modelling to better understand the potential of digital technology, and the role of cloud
In total, our modelling estimates that achieving the EU’s Digital Decade agenda could unlock over €488 billion in economic value for France. That is equivalent to 22% of the country’s overall economy.
In this report, we look at the following key questions for each of the four areas of the Digital Compass:
- What is the current state of play in France against the EU's Digital Decade goals?
- What are the opinions of French citizens and businesses?
- What is the role of cloud computing in supporting faster progress?
Digital public services for businesses (score of 0 to 100)
| Area | 2030 Target | Current Status |
| Business | ||
| % of businesses using cloud | 75% | 21.5% |
| % of businesses using AI | 75% | 19.5% |
| % of businesses using big data | 75% | 21.7% |
| of SMEs reaching at least a basic level of digital intensity | 90% | 54.9% |
| Skills | ||
| Share of ICT specialists in labour market | 20 million in the EU | 4.5% |
| Proportion of ICT specialists who are female | Gender convergence | 20.1% |
| % of adults with at least basic digital skills | 80% | 57.3% |
| Infrastructures | ||
| % of households with gigabit equivalent Internet coverage | 100% | 52.6% |
| Government | ||
| % of key public services for citizens offered digitally | 100% | 73.4%6 |
| % of key public services for businesses offered digitally | 100% | 91.4%7 |
Source: European Union DESI Index
Business
State of Play
| EU’s Digital Decade Goal | State of Play |
| At least 75% of European Union enterprises to take up cloud computing services, big data and artificial intelligence. | At present, France remains a long way from the EU’s 75% target: around 22% of French companies have adopted the cloud, 20% AI, and 22% big data. Based on current trends, France will not see 75% of companies adopting the cloud until 2050. |
| More than 90% of SMEs reach at least a basic level of digital intensity.8 | France is still far off the EU target for 90% of SMEs to reach at least a basic level of digital intensity. In France, 55% of enterprises currently pass this threshold. |
Progress towards cloud target
What did our research show?
Not enough companies are taking advantage of the power of existing digital tools
In total, 56% of businesses say digital technology has become more important to their business in the last five years. However, France is a long way from the EU’s target for 75% of companies to adopt cloud, big data and AI. Some of the lowest hanging fruit for boosting productivity is the adoption of existing technologies such as cloud or digital tools like CRM, ERP, or online accounting by small businesses. This alone can boost business productivity by 10-25%.9
In order to compare the level of digital technology adoption across businesses, and see what types of businesses were lagging on their digital journey, we gave each business a score of 1-12 for digital intensity, based on the European Union’s 2020 digital intensity index.10 We found that smaller businesses were significantly less likely to score highly for digital intensity.
While around half of all European businesses reported using online tools to store data, use social media or advertise online, it was only the relatively digitally intense businesses who were taking advantage of more advanced workflows such as analysing internal data or running their own custom applications.
Which, if any, of the following purposes does your business use online tools for?
When asked about the most important barriers to greater use of digital technology, digitally intense businesses pointed to the cost of implementing new digital technologies (34%) or shortage of digital skills among their workforce (20%), while those with low digital intensity instead gave slightly different reasons such as saying digital technology was unlikely to make a significant difference (28%) or that it was too expensive to implement (29%). For these businesses, awareness and knowledge of potential benefits can be as important an inhibitor as technical barriers.
Which, if any, of the following do you think it would be possible for your business to use digital technology to help with more than you do currently?
Increasing cloud adoption could play an important role in supporting digital transformation
By turning compute power and data storage into a flexible service, cloud computing helps reduce costs for business, accelerates innovation, makes it easier to access data everywhere, improves digital security, and helps businesses become more sustainable. It is also a crucial enabler of the next wave of digital technologies such as machine learning, Internet of Things (IoT), and 6G. As part of this project, one of our main focuses was the particular role cloud computing could play in boosting business growth.
Types of Cloud Computing
There are three main types of cloud computing:
- Software as a Service (SaaS). SaaS or cloud tool providers offer consumer facing applications or services that either run or process their data in the cloud. This allows their users to often use the same application on a wide range of platforms apart from their main computer, such as on their phone or through a direct web interface. Examples of leading SaaS providers today include Adobe, Salesforce, Zendesk, Lemlist, UiPath and SAP.
- Platform as Service (PaaS). In the next level of cloud computing, developers run databases in the cloud, while the underlying hardware infrastructure is abstracted through virtualisation.
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). In this type of cloud computing, businesses replace their own on-premises services with hired data storage and computing power owned by a public cloud provider. This model was first pioneered with the creation of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2006.
In total, we estimate that every day over 5000 new cloud-enabled companies are created in Europe. If we could boost cloud adoption in small businesses across the EU by 10 percentage points, we estimate that that alone would increase the French economy by 0.4% of GVA, or an additional €8 billion.
Today, the global public cloud market is worth over $300 billion.11 Despite this, it is still relatively early days for the cloud, with many workflows yet to be transitioned. On one estimate, just 9% of global IT spend currently goes through the cloud.12 In our business polling, around half of cloud users (42%) said that they had only started using cloud in the last three years.
The Benefits of Cloud Computing for Businesses
The benefits of cloud computing include:
- Flexibility and Cost Savings. Using cloud computing, companies pay only for the technology they use. This means that they can scale capacity up and down to meet sudden or seasonal spikes in demand, and can avoid paying for unused computing power. On average, business servers often see utilisation rates of under 20%, while cloud server utilisation can exceed 50%.13 We estimate that European AWS users saved around 39% of their IT costs by moving their workloads to the cloud.
- Innovation and Agility. The cloud allows for the more rapid development, deployment, and scaling of new digital tools and services. European developers told us that using AWS sped up their development times by an average of 26%.
- Store and Protect Data. By building applications in the cloud, companies can automate manual security tasks, while maintaining ownership and privacy for their data.
At the same time, many businesses are currently only using cloud computing for relatively basic purposes, such as file storage, with only a minority currently taking advantage of more advanced use cases such as big data analysis or running their own internal applications.
IaaS and PaaS play a key role in digital transformation for many businesses, with cloud users saying PaaS had enabled them to replace paper or manual processes with digital systems (42%), automate existing business processes (39%) or develop new types of applications (36%).
Has the use of cloud services enabled you to do any of the following?
Skills
State of Play
| EU’s Digital Decade Goal | State of Play |
| 80% of those aged 16-74 have at least basic digital skills. | While a majority of Europeans possess basic digital skills, there remains a significant difference between countries. In France, 57% currently have basic digital skills. In the last five years, the overall prevalence of basic digital skills has increased by only 0.5 percentage points, and on current trends France looks unlikely to achieve the EU’s target for 80% of the population to achieve basic digital skills by 2030. At the current rate of progress, the proportion of the population with basic digital skills will only be 59% by 2030. |
| 20 million employed in information and communications technology (ICT), with men and women representing equal proportions of the workforce. | Over the last five years, the share of ICT specialists within total EU employment has increased from 3.5% to 4.3%. This is equivalent to just over 8 million workers. While some progress is being made on increasing the proportion of female ICT specialists, this is happening very slowly. In France, the percentage of female ICT specialists has only increased by 1.2 percentage points in the last five years. |
Proportion of female ICT specialists
Progress towards Digital Skills target
What did our research show?
A shortage of digital skills is actively impeding growth for the most digitally advanced companies.
Among businesses, digital skills were seen as important or essential for 77% of businesses and 88% of highly digital intensive businesses.
Around half of business decision makers (53%) reported that they felt like they personally needed to have better digital skills for their job, and 66% reported that basic digital skills were important for their role.
In our polling, the use of dedicated digital specialists was still relatively rare among smaller companies:
Digitally intensive businesses were significantly more likely to say that they found it difficult to find staff with good digital skills (53%) compared to the average business (30%) - and that a shortage of digital skills had affected their business, with 40% saying it had slowed growth, 36% that it had increased costs, and 31% that it had slowed the development of new technology.
Basic and intermediate digital skills are likely to be as important as advanced digital skills to the future of the European economy
We asked both consumers and businesses which digital skills they believed were important for the average worker to be able to do their job today. Europeans believed these skills should include basic web and digital skills, while more digitally intensive businesses were more likely to think that data analysis and programming were also important.
Which digital skills do you think it is important for an average worker to be able to do today?
When we asked consumers what digital skills they felt confident with, 25% would feel confident creating their own website. When we asked what digital tasks they had completed in the last three months:
While not everybody needs to be able to write code for their job, or create their own machine learning model from scratch, almost everyone could benefit from possessing good intermediate digital skills, such as how to stay safe online, research or learn a new skill effectively, collaborate with their colleagues through new online tools or do basic data manipulation in a spreadsheet. On one estimate, over 40% of workers who use office software daily do not have sufficient skills to use it effectively.14
Similarly, even if relatively few consumers are currently using programming skills in their day-to-day life, there was more agreement that it was important for children to learn programming at school.
When we asked French parents what digital skills were important for their children to learn:
Infrastructures
State of Play
| EU’s Digital Decade Goal15 | State of Play |
| All European households covered by a Gigabit network, and all populated areas covered by 5G | While investment is still needed, France looks likely to meet its Digital Decade targets for connectivity. 53% of households are already able to benefit from fixed Very High Capacity Networks (VHCN). |
Progress towards broadband
What did our research show?
Digital technology is one of the most crucial forms of infrastructure
In our polling, both consumers and businesses chose faster or more reliable internet as their leading priority for infrastructure investment, ahead of more traditional forms of transport infrastructure such as roads, railways, or airports. As we have seen in the last few years, in many instances, digital connectivity can act as a substitute for traditional forms of transport, reducing the need to travel for work.
If you had to choose, which of the following types of infrastructure investment would prefer your Government to prioritise in your local area?
While consumers and business decision makers were relatively satisfied with their internet connection while at home or in the office, they were less happy with the quality of their internet connection while travelling:
At home
At work
While travelling
As important as basic internet connectivity are the other core layers of technology infrastructure, such as access to cloud computing data centres or semiconductor fab capacity.
In the next decade, low latency applications will require edge computing nodes to complement the cloud, bringing computing power closer to the end user. This will help support:
- Smarter energy and transport networks in cities, helping increase efficiency, reduce congestion and supporting autonomous vehicles
- Real time quality checks in agriculture or manufacturing
- IoT solutions for the safety of workers in hazardous environments
As one of its Digital Decade targets, the EU has set a goal for the creation of “10,000 climate-neutral highly secure edge nodes.” By 2025, the European Commission expects 80% of all data to be processed in smart devices closer to the user, known as edge computing. Today, it is estimated that 80% of the processing and analysis of data takes place in data centres and centralised computing facilities.16
However, while this kind of local compute will grow in importance, the internet and cloud are likely to remain highly global. Much of the internet’s economic power has come from reducing international barriers to trade. In our business polling we saw that businesses highly valued retaining the ability to choose the best technology for them.
In our business polling the most important factors for selecting a cloud provider are reliability (43%), security (42%), cost (31%), reputation (26%) and access to latest technologies (20%). The nationality of the cloud provider was seen as the least important (7%).17
Digital infrastructure can support the green transition
Alongside digital transformation, the other important structural change facing EU economies in the 2020s will be the transition to a decarbonised economy. Greater use of digital technology will play an essential role in supporting this change.
To start, digital technologies such as the cloud, IoT and machine learning will help create a smarter energy grid, creating greater flexibility, more efficient use of resources and rewarding consumers and businesses who reduce energy waste. Intelligent systems will help homes to react to changing wholesale energy prices and cloud-based systems will automate the provision of flexible services to cut bills and reduce emissions. In our consumer polling, 49% of French people said that they would support their government spending more on researching smarter, more resilient energy grids.
This greater energy efficiency can also apply to the computing process itself. Centralised cloud computing data centres can be more energy efficient than equivalent workloads provisioned through on-premises servers. While the total amount of computing output increased by a factor of six between 2010 and 2018, overall energy consumption only increased by 6%.18 451 Research estimates that businesses can reduce their energy use by nearly 80% by using AWS Cloud instead of using their own data centres. In France, the migration of French companies' workloads to the AWS Cloud would result in energy savings of up to 78% and a reduction in CO2 emissions equivalent to approximately 233 metric tons.
For individual businesses, digital technology can help them better monitor and reduce their carbon footprint. In our business polling, 84% of French businesses agreed that sustainability would either maintain or grow in importance as a factor in their businesses’ decisions. However, only 57% were confident they currently had adequate digital tools to monitor and improve their sustainability.
Government
Proportion of e-government users
What did our research show?
The EU is a world leader for digital government, but there remains significant untapped potential in France
82% of French citizens currently report using e-government services. Many of Europe’s governments are recognised as among the world’s leading digital governments, with the UN’s Online Services Index, for example, rating France 18th.
| Rank | Country Name | UN Online Service Index Score |
| 1 | Republic of Korea | 1.00 |
| 2 | Estonia | 0.99 |
| 3 | Denmark | 0.97 |
| 4 | Finland | 0.97 |
| 5 | Singapore | 0.96 |
| 6 | United Kingdom | 0.96 |
| 7 | United States of America | 0.95 |
| 8 | Australia | 0.95 |
| 9 | Austria | 0.95 |
| 10 | New Zealand | 0.93 |
| 11 | Kazakhstan | 0.92 |
| 12 | Netherlands | 0.91 |
| 13 | Japan | 0.91 |
| 14 | China | 0.91 |
| 15 | Sweden | 0.90 |
| 16 | United Arab Emirates | 0.90 |
| 17 | Spain | 0.89 |
| 18 | France | 0.88 |
| 19 | Norway | 0.88 |
| 20 | Cyprus | 0.87 |
A majority of French citizens we surveyed were optimistic about the level of digital government:
On average, we saw untapped potential for greater use of digital services. When we asked about specific activities - such as accessing medical records, or renewing a passport - a far greater proportion said they were comfortable performing these activities digitally than had already done so.
The EU has set targets for 100% of EU citizens to have access to their medical records and at least 80% of EU citizens to use a digital identification (ID) solution. Our polling found that just under a quarter have accessed their medical records (23%) or been asked to prove their identity (17%), while 49% said they would be comfortable accessing their medical records, and 39% comfortable proving their identity online, suggesting potential for further uptake.
In our polling, we found relatively little evidence of a difference in attitudes across ages. The oldest age demographic (65+) were more likely than the youngest (18-24) to say that they would feel comfortable using a website or app to book a medical appointment, pay taxes or a fine or renew a passport or driving licence.21
The vast majority (75%+) of those who had performed different digital activities said that they found them helpful.
You said you had used a government website or app to do the following activities. How helpful or unhelpful did you find it?
Cloud computing plays a crucial role in enabling digital government: collecting data, keeping it secure, and providing cost savings for the taxpayer. We estimate that moving 10% of current IT systems to the cloud has the potential to save European taxpayers over €900 million a year.
Appendix - Methodology
Our headline estimate of the potential economic impact of achieving the EU’s Digital Decade targets is based on adding together our estimate of the impact of achieving four goals:
- Increasing business cloud computing uptake to 75%.
- Small business adoption of three key digital tools (CRM, ERP, and fast broadband) increases to 90%.
- 80% of EU adults achieving basic digital skills.
- The potential economic impact from AI and big data
We chose these four goals as a reasonable proxy for the overall set of targets, while avoiding double counting from goals whose potential economic impact would overlap (eg economic potential from AI, and increasing the number of EU unicorns), or that would be hard to quantify (e.g. the economic impact of R&D into quantum computing). While our small business adoption threshold is not a formal EU target, we believe this represents a reasonable proxy for other EU other goals around cloud/big data/AI uptake or business digital intensity, while allowing us to draw on existing well evidenced studies.
Increasing business cloud computing uptake to 75% by 2030
In order to do this, we combine the following estimates:
- Data from our business poll on current cloud computing uptake per business size per region, and the breakout between IaaS / PaaS / SaaS. For countries, where we did not have direct polling data, we proxied based off the EU’s DESI data on cloud computing uptakes for businesses with more than ten employees.
- Data on public cloud spending (IaaS / PaaS) taken where possible from polling, and calibrated against third party data from IDC and Statista.
- The average ROI for cloud computing, taken as the average of the estimates from our previous impact studies for AWS (UK, France, Canada, US).
- OECD derived GVA effect multipliers for each country.
Small business adoption of three key digital tools (CRM, ERP, and fast broadband) increases to 90%
In order to estimate this, we:
- Captured existing uptake of each digital tool (high-speed broadband, ERP, CRM) from our business polling for small, medium and large businesses. Where this data does not exist, we instead proxied based on EU DESI date on broadband, ERP and CRM take-up.
- Assumed that uptake for all business sizes across the three types of tool is levelled up to at least 90%.
- Utilise the calculated average impact on productivity of each class of tool from OECD (2019).
80% of adults achieving basic digital skills
For this estimate, we combined:
- EU DESI data from 2021 on the level of adults with lower than basic digital skills per country. (Given our survey data was completed through an online panel, everyone who completed it had to have at least minimal online skills and therefore we did not attempt to use it to benchmark the prevalence of lower than basic digital skills.)
- An estimated average 9% increase in wages for adults achieving basic digital skills in the UK, drawn from average the estimates from this and this paper.
- Adjusting this estimate for each country based on OECD (2017)’s estimate of the relative impact on wages per country of increased ICT intensity of jobs.
Potential increase in economy wide GVA from AI and big data
We extrapolated from McKinsey (2018)’s estimate of the economic impact of AI by 2030, allocating it to individual countries and modifying it by:
- Using Tortoise’s AI Index as a proxy to calibrate how well prepared individual European countries are to take advantage of AI / big data.
- Deducting impact that should have already taken place since 2018, based on a slow S-curve diffusion path for AI.
- https://www.google.com/url?q=https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/priorities-2019-2024/europe-fit-digital-age/europes-digital-decade-digital-targets-2030_en&sa=D&source=docs&ust=1654767330657438&usg=AOvVaw3dreZ22hPe5OcjXJSbe0kX
- Proxied based on France’s recent progress in increasing basic digital skills and cloud adoption.
- Businesses are given 1 point for each of the following: more than 50% of persons employed having access to the internet for business purposes, employment of ICT specialists; fast broadband (30 Mbps or above); providing more than 20% of persons employed with a portable device allowing mobile internet connections; having a website; a website has sophisticated functionalities (at least one of: description of goods or services, price lists; possibility for visitors to customise or design online goods or services; tracking or status of orders placed; personalised content in the website for regular/ recurrent visitors); use of 3D printing; buying medium-high cloud computing services; sending invoices suitable for automated processing; use of industrial or service robots; having e-commerce sales accounting for at least 1% of total turnover; analysing big data internally from any data source or externally. Digital intense businesses are defined as those that scored 6 or above.
- Skills for a Digital World, OECD (2016)
- Public First calculation based on the Total Economy Database, The Conference Board
- The share of administrative steps that can be done online for major life events (birth of a child, new residence, etc.) for citizens (Scale of 0 to 100)
- Digital public services for businesses (score of 0 to 100)
- This is measured by the business’ use of at least four of 12 selected digital technologies chosen by the EU, with the exact list of technologies varying by year.
- OECD
- Businesses are given 1 point for each of the following: more than 50% of persons employed having access to the internet for business purposes, employment of ICT specialists; fast broadband (30 Mbps or above); providing more than 20% of persons employed with a portable device allowing mobile internet connections; having a website; a website has sophisticated functionalities (at least one of: description of goods or services, price lists; possibility for visitors to customise or design online goods or services; tracking or status of orders placed; personalised content in the website for regular/ recurrent visitors); use of 3D printing; buying medium-high cloud computing services; sending invoices suitable for automated processing; use of industrial or service robots; having e-commerce sales accounting for at least 1% of total turnover; analysing big data internally from any data source or externally.
- https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS47685521
- https://itif.org/publications/2021/06/01/secrets-cloud-computings-first-stage-action-agenda-government-and-industry
- https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/data-center-efficiency-assessment-IP.pdf
- https://www.eca.europa.eu/Lists/ECADocuments/RW21_02/RW_Digital_skills_EN.pdf
- In addition, the EU also set goals for increasing its share of semiconductor production, deploying at least 10,000 climate neutral secure edges, and creating its first quantum computer. Given that these metrics either do not have or are difficult to currently measure, we have not included them
- https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/cloud-computing
- Respondents were given fourteen potential factors; Reliability; First cloud provider we tried; Reputation; Cost; Security; Access to latest technologies; Breadth of services offered; Specific services or APIs offered by that cloud provider; Nationality of the provider; Global footprint of provider; Ease of disaster recovery; Location where data is stored; Wider ecosystem of skills, services, and partner companies; Environmental impact and/or lower carbon footprint
- https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aba3758
- The EU has also set targets for 100% of EU citizens to have access to their medical records and at least 80% of EU to citizens to use a digital identification (ID) solution, but comparable data for these does not yet exist.
- DESI - Compare countries progress — Digital Scoreboard - Data & Indicators (digital-agenda-data.eu)
- One caveat is that our polling was done through an online panel provider, so respondents without the internet altogether or basic digital skills would be unlikely to have taken part.